


Visions

by Eisthenameofme



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Beholding, Gen, Leitners, Statement, Statement Fic, The Eye, creepy visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 02:40:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19416793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisthenameofme/pseuds/Eisthenameofme
Summary: Statement of [redacted], regarding their visions. Statement given in writing, July 28, 2019.





	Visions

Statement of [redacted], regarding their visions. Statement given in writing, July 28, 2019.

“The initial event was quite a few years ago, so the details may be a bit hazy. This happened when I was in about second or third grade, which would be when I was around six to eight years old. Reading comprehension wouldn’t have been an issue for me – I was reading at a post high school level by about fourth grade – so my reading selection was only really limited when my parents decided the material was inappropriate for my age. Thankfully for me, this wasn’t a frequent occurrence. 

By this point, I knew I enjoyed children’s horror – the Goosebumps series, I remember, but also the sort of ghost story you’d hear around a campfire, or tales of murder from friends trying to one up each other at a sleepover. 

This is all to say that when I decided I wanted to try something more challenging, but to these same tastes, no one was much inclined to stop me from reading the classics, and no one objected to my selection of an anthology of Poe stories borrowed from my elementary school library. 

I can still remember where it had been positioned: on the first row, in a collection of black, leather-bound classics, to me seeming about midway up the shelf, but probably rather closer to the ground, considering.

I don’t remember exactly why I chose to start with the story I did. Knowing me, it was probably the first story in the book; I liked to read straight through, even when I knew it wasn’t necessary, and still tend to – but it wouldn’t be unrealistic to think I chose whichever title from the table of contents seemed most appealing.

I read the Tell-Tale heart.

I’ve read it again since, though not from the same book. I was a bit put off of Poe for a bit. Probably not for more than a few months, I'm really not an enormously patient individual, but by the time I read more of his work it was from a different source. I’ve never noticed any discrepancies in the actual text in any of my subsequent readings, but naturally that wasn’t what I had been reading for at the time. I was reading to enjoy the story.

I did. I wasn’t wrong in thinking I’d enjoy Poe’s work, though the manner in which I read that story wasn’t necessarily the manner intended. I did understand, at the time, what the reader was meant to find scary. I knew that the narrator was the murderer, unreliable, and that it was the murder, and the perspective from which the story was told, that we the readers were meant to find unsettling. But it wasn’t the murder, or the murderer, or even the phantom heartbeat, pounding relentlessly from under the floorboards, that unsettled me. It was the _eye_. The single, staring, vulture eye, clouded, and a pale, icy blue. I fixated on the horror of that eye, regardless of what I knew the reader was intended to find more alarming.

Later, when I had returned home, as I was turning from the hallway to my bedroom that night, I saw the eye. The same eye from the story, exactly as it had been described and as I had pictured, excepting the inhuman size it now assumed, hanging suspended in my doorway against its dark backdrop. It was there for a moment, and gone. 

I believe I only mentioned any of this once, to my parents, immediately following this first occurrence. I’ve tried to check with them, asking whether they might remember my saying anything about the book, or about my seeing things when I was little, but they don’t recall my ever mentioning it. It wasn’t that I avoided talking about it out of fear of ridicule, or being brushed aside, so much as that I already thought I had an explanation. I assumed I had overestimated my tolerance for horror geared more toward adults, and didn’t see what else it could be but my imagination.

In fairness to my younger self, I’m not inclined to think I had the resources to properly understand it in any case. While my preferences did tend toward the horrific and fantastical, nothing I had consumed by that point really portrayed the supernatural in anything near that way, and it was hardly as if I could do any sort of extensive research on the subject.

In any case, I also failed to connect the subsequent events to either the supernatural, the book itself, or that first vision until years later. Nothing I saw after connected so directly to any other story I heard, through book or otherwise. 

I did gradually realize that what I was seeing couldn’t realistically be put off to any typical tricks of the imagination; it didn’t correspond to anything in my life, fictional or otherwise, and it was far too frequent and consistent to be normal.

It happened most often, and was the most disturbing, when it was dark, but it could happen whenever my eyes lit on an area suitably darker than its surroundings – the shadowy corners of a room, or cracked doorway, or even deep patches of shade. Whatever, it seemed, provided a blank enough space for an image to form.

The only thing unchanging, in terms of subject, of what I saw was its relation to horror. It was completely involuntary, and unavoidable, and I would see anything from severed limbs, to apparitions, to corpses, to dark figures, to horrifically bent creatures sidling through the adjacent room. Occasionally there were things I saw more often in one area, or for a certain period of time. One I found particularly horrifying – by this point in middle school or early high school - was something, apparently a human man, in a worn, cheesy, Halloween store dog costume, with a hood standing in as the dogs “head”, despite the other being plainly visible. I remember it crawling across the floor toward me, frenzied and with a bizarre speed, and its movements were terribly _wrong_. I remember being afraid what would happen if I was still watching when it reached me.

None of them did. Ever reach me. And I developed a habit of actually closing my eyes when I would turn the lights out at night, fumbling my way to my bed from memory. Laying on the side closest to the wall and resolutely facing it, so that nothing would have the space to appear.

Over the years this was happening, I started to think they might be hallucinations. As I started researching different types, though, and their causes, nothing fit. The closest I could find were hypnogogic hallucinations, which people sometimes see near sleep, but even that was only because they typically happened at night, and a very tenuous connection.

While I didn’t find any real understanding in what they _were_ through this, yet, I did start looking at them again. Willingly. Because I had to learn more about them if I wanted to understand what they were. I think this was when I was about fourteen. It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally found any stories about the books, and the powers, and the Eye, which allowed me to properly connect everything together. And by that point, I wasn’t actually having problems with what I saw, what I see, anymore. My aversion to seeing them died, albeit rather slowly, when I started watching them, trying to study and understand them, by choice. I do see them involuntarily, still, but in the way you might catch movement in the corner of your eye and turn without thinking. I can _choose_ to see now, when I want. It’s fascinating.

In any case I obviously don’t have access to the book anymore, which is somewhat disappointing, as I only read the one story and would be curious to see what effects the others might hold. Rather more fortunately, I have found other books connected to Beholding since, which have been quite interesting in their own right, but are decidedly not the subject of this statement. I believe this is its conclusion.”

Statement ends.


End file.
